GOING ORGANIC

As both a new arrival to North Carolina and a recent refugee from a law career, I was seeking a new and interesting experience. An organic farming class offered at Central Carolina Community College fit the bill. Not only would I learn new gardening techniques and pest control measures, but for three hours a week I could sample the life of a working farmer.
Little did I suspect that organic farming consists of only one part gardening to nine parts chemistry and soil analysis. For a former literature major like myself, there were intolerably massive doses of incomprehensible terms like “Ph”.
The first class, held at a real farm in Pittsboro, began with the customary introduction of the participants. Several were already professional farmers in search of knowledge in the “organic” realm. Several others were considering career changes into full-time farming, though they had degrees or experience in such related fields as botany or forestry. One classmate had just inherited twenty-seven acres and craved direction and inspiration — organic farm or housing development? A contingent were women intent upon establishing a lesbian commune. And then there was me, in over my head, a retired lawyer who grows a backyard vegetable garden.
The farmer/professor was Doug Jones, whose past was intriguing. Doug graduated from Harvard circa 1975 and somehow missed the memo about investment banking. His was the stringy body of a man who has done backbreaking, painstaking physical labor for nearly forty years. Just as stringy was the grey ponytail down the middle of his back.
Certainly, Doug’s jeans, boots and flannel shirts started out clean each day; however, by the five p.m. start of our weekly class, they were always caked in strata of North Carolina soil that Doug could analyze in intense, fascinated detail, for several hours. To me, they looked muddy.
And THAT summarizes the course for me. Yes, I learned to place a tomato plant sideways in its hole. I learned to squeeze a seedling with proper tenderness when transplanting. I learned to construct a raised bed and to make a temporary greenhouse. I learned one should not refer to the class as “orgasmic” gardening in front of classmates who do not consider it a laughing matter.
But I also learned being a farmer is extraordinarily hard work. There are challenges wrought by bugs and bacteria made exponentially harder by the organic element. And, organic or not, there are battles with heat, drought, floods and hail. Yes, hail in North Carolina! And there are vagaries of produce prices and supply shortages, etc.
Farming is a seven-day-a-week, 365-day-a-year pursuit, and if the farmer is LUCKY, there is a small profit in the end. While I am happy to apply the lessons I learned to my humble garden at home, there is no new career in it for me. Ultimately, what I learned is not to complain about the price of organic produce at the market.